By Bill Nicholov
If you’re a Republican and you can’t admit that Democrats are sometimes right, the partisan political war will never end. The same applies to Democrats admitting that Republicans are sometimes right.
Of course, this won’t happen because the American superiority complex dictates that one can never admit that one’s “enemy” is ever correct…or anything but “evil”, for that matter. And this ensures that the US will continue to wreak self-righteous havoc all over the world in the name of “spreading American values and democracy”.
American politicians know that what they’re really doing is intervening on a massive scale in order to control the world for the USA’s benefit, disregarding the destruction that they cause, but they’ve told the lie about “spreading freedom” so often that some of them might actually believe it. Many American political pundits do. As do US foreign policy advisors. I’ve met with many of them, and it’s surreal hearing them describe how US foreign interventionism is “saving” your country from the evil that is [insert current US enemy] while simultaneously destroying your country for their own benefit.
My country is Macedonia. And Macedonians are being told (and I’m hearing it directly from the horse’s mouth) that US foreign interventionism is “justified” because other countries might intervene. Yes, that’s the argument. A pre-emptive strike against another people’s basic human rights in order to satisfy US foreign policy. How about denouncing all foreign interventionism – and refusing to engage in it – instead of trying to justify your own.
So what has the US done?
As I explain here, it has “employed drones, dropped bombs, killed civilians, enabled dictators, pardoned terrorists, terrorized populations, imprisoned innocent people, threatened their families, violated international law, stripped entire ethnic groups of their basic human rights…”
Why?
In Macedonia’s case, to appease Greece and Bulgaria, which threatened to veto Macedonia’s NATO and EU membership bids unless it changed its name, identity and history to suit their anti-Macedonian policies of denying the existence and persecution of the large Macedonian minorities within their borders. Bulgaria, an ally of Hitler and the occupying power in Macedonia during WWII, even threw in revisions of Jewish history to deny its role in deporting 7,000 Macedonian Jews to the Treblinka death camp in Poland.
Your American tax dollars at work.
So how can the self-proclaimed “beacon of human rights”, go along with (and actually lead) the policy to destroy Macedonians’ name and ethnic identity by using brutal tactics, sheer terror (and actual US-pardoned terrorists)? To increase NATO (and EU) membership to satisfy grossly misguided US foreign policy.
So this is the narrative that the American public hears – how the US must “save the world”, by controlling it. And disagreeing with this notion gets one painted as being sympathetic to the “enemy”. Everything in US political discourse is good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, 100% or nothing. Don’t forget that US politicians had you believe that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein used to be “the good guys”. But one cannot denounce US interventionism without being drawn, by the US, into a discussion about “the other guy”. Offence is the best defence, and deflection is not a bad tactic either…
But not everything is “good vs. evil”. It is often “evil vs. evil”. Or in many cases, because of US foreign policy – just evil.
The same tactics are used by both US political parties against each other, and even within each party themselves. Unless you agree 100% with [insert policy here], you are labelled as the enemy.
Get out of the stupidity trap. Don’t blindly obey your political party (or faction). Support, or oppose, policies based on policies, not politics. And don’t blindly obey what both parties claim about “spreading democracy”. Admit that it’s tyranny. The same tactics that should be used to end the US political civil war can end America’s war on the rest of the world.
Bill Nicholov is the President of Macedonian Human Rights Movement International
